from God’s Phallus, by Howard Eilberg-Schwartz

“If the deity is the father writ large, then this divine mas­culin­i­ty is by no means sim­ply a con­fir­ma­tion of human mas­culin­i­ty. It is at the same time a fun­da­men­tal threat and chal­lenge to it… Indeed…in at least one respect men’s rela­tion­ship with God is even more prob­lem­at­ic than women’s, for on a het­ero­sex­u­al mod­el of inti­mate rela­tion­ships, women are more appro­pri­ate objects of divine desire than are men. One way of escap­ing this prob­lem is by sym­bol­i­cal­ly dis­plac­ing male ten­sions and con­tra­dic­tions onto women. The oth­er­ness of women is exag­ger­at­ed to min­i­mize the ways men are made into oth­ers in a sys­tem which val­i­dates male author­i­ty.”